Mr. Tony Murphy:

These are political decisions and arrangements between the member states and the Commission. I can understand that the priorities of some member states are completely different from when the plans were initially drawn up. I would say that changing midstream is going to be difficult, just from a practical point of view, and we saw how long it took for the plans to be approved in the first place. We have already highlighted that we have issues in terms of knowing how much the value of each of these milestones and targets are met. That will be even more difficult now. If the costs stay the same and they change the milestones and targets, how do we match everything again?

In terms of flexibility and so on, we are all for that once we ensure that there is proper accountability and, ultimately, that these funds are protected, we minimise fraud and so on. It is a lot of money that is being put out there very quickly, which inherently means the risk of fraud and error increases.

The Deputy mentioned energy. We were asked for an opinion with regard to energy and REPowerEU, and they are talking about adding a chapter to the RRF plans from member states. Our opinion was very clear. We said that we have to react to this situation but we asked whether it is really the best way to react by splitting the limited money, which I think is around €200 billion, across all of the member states based on some allocation key which may or may not have any relevance to the actual energy needs in those member states, rather than concentrating on having some big cross-border projects which would have a significant impact on the energy supply in the EU. There are a lot of issues in terms of member states wanting to keep their own funding. Even within the RRF itself, there are very few cross-border projects involved and it is mainly another funding source for member states. The European Parliament's Committee on Budgetary Control, CONT, is going to Madrid in January to have a look at this because they want to ask the Spanish authorities where the money - the €11.5 billion they got in December - is. They got it for reforms, but where is it? Is this budget support or what is it?

We are at the very early stages of the RRF. It is going to be a very difficult area for us, as auditors, and a big challenge. As the Deputy said, we expect to have 17 or 18 payment claims this year and we already have payment claims in regard to the original plan and milestones. If we now start changing the plans midstream, I think it will be very complicated. I am not saying it is impossible but it will be very complicated.